How to be an effective propagandist

So many propagandists are satisfied with measurable influence on perceptions and decisions, but that’s just a consolation prize for when you cannot achieve your main objective, which is to build a religious cult.

Whether you are promoting war, legitimizing a dictator, astroturfing public support, or just selling shitcoin, you want your propaganda to be worth the money your sponsor is paying. Let’s say you are one of the more ambitious propagandists. How exactly do you build a cult for your agenda?

Step 1: Gain trust. Trust encourages people to drop their defenses and start listening. Trust is often shockingly cheap, especially trust of lonely people. Give some flowers to retired women. Shake hands and smile. Real help to people in need can be very cost-effective in front of a camera. Defend people who are very wrong about something. They are rejected by everyone else and happy to be your ally. Don’t forget self-praise. Give your projects trust-inspiring names and talk about noble causes.

Step 2: Sow doubt. Reality is your enemy. Your goal in this stage is to gradually dissolve your subjects’ sense of reality and replace it with a sense of mystery. Ask perplexing questions with no clear answer. Discuss unsolved problems. Expose complexity hiding below abstractions. Pay more attention to exceptions than rules. Trash reputation of reliable sources. Present the world as unknowable.

Step 3: Tell a story. People cannot easily test whether your story is consistent with reality or not. They instead look for internal consistency within the story. Lucky for you, since the world is complicated, descriptions of reality tend to be contradictory whereas your story can be crafted to make perfect sense. Reality is also boring and often unpleasant. Be a good writer and fill your story with plenty of drama, heroes and villains, high-stakes conflicts, and fulfilled wishes of your audience. Your story will be more believable than reality.

Step 4: Isolate. At this stage, retention is your main goal. Warn your followers about dangers of mainstream sources. Recommend sources under your control instead. Build in-group tolerance while provoking confrontation with the out-group. Encourage obnoxious and weird behavior and teach your followers to say utter nonsense, so that nobody wants to talk to them. If you lose someone anyway, don’t worry. People who leave fundamentalist sects do not become atheists regardless of how bad the sect was. They join conservative wings of mainstream religions, because they don’t want to look stupid and they cannot admit it was all for nothing. Convert someone once and they are yours for life.

It’s obvious I am not a big fan of propaganda. Real advice on the Internet is not this blunt, because propagandists don’t like it when their craft is laid bare. I just wanted to post a warning that abusive practices pioneered by modern religious fundamentalists have been adapted for political propaganda. While the most obvious example I see is Russian propaganda here in Slovakia, there are many examples around the world and across the political spectrum. Even some grassroots movements employ these practices. There’s no obvious defense. Nobody is immune. Watch your step.